


for in the morning you are called (is what she said)

by Anonymous



Category: The Daevabad Trilogy - S. A. Chakraborty
Genre: F/F, but seriously: fuck the moon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 08:02:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24347695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The first few weeks of weapons training was full of lectures. Don't do this, Aqisa would say, correcting her grip on the dagger. Don't do this, she'd say, nudging Zaynab's feet with her own to adjust her stance. Definitely don't do this, she'd say, and reach into Zaynab's garments and make sure the weapons were secured correctly.
Relationships: Zaynab al Qahtani/Aqisa
Comments: 6
Kudos: 33
Collections: Anonymous





	for in the morning you are called (is what she said)

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to wait until I'd read Empire of Gold to write Aqisa/Zaynab fic, but I've had "fly me to the moon/let me kick its fucking ass" stuck in my head for two months now and this is apparently how I cope with that.
> 
> Set during _Kingdom of Copper_.

The first few weeks of weapons training was full of lectures. Don't do this, Aqisa would say, correcting her grip on the dagger. Don't do this, she'd say, nudging Zaynab's feet with her own to adjust her stance. Definitely don't do this, she'd say, and reach into Zaynab's garments and make sure the weapons were secured correctly. 

It was tedious. Zaynab had always thought Ali's time in the Citadel had been glamorous, exciting, full of walking along beams with a spear in each hand and a dagger between the teeth. (Aqisa had stared at Zaynab in horrified fascination when she'd mentioned that, then shook her head very slowly and said something to herself in Gezirriya that was probably a prayer for patience.) Instead it must have been like this. How to stand. How to move your feet. What to do with your free hand. How to store your blade. (Not between your teeth unless you wanted to stab your cheeks or cut off your tongue, and that was if you were lucky.) And even after all of that, when Zaynab finally was allowed to start practice fighting, Aqisa had her on the mat under less than a minute. 

"Fuck!"

Above her, Aqisa went absolutely still. Zaynab supposed that if this were a real fight, she could take this advantage to shove her off, or ram her forehead into her opponent's face, but that seemed like it would be painful, and also she didn't really want Aqisa to get off of her, and--

"I thought," said Aqisa, her gray eyes as startled as Zaynab had ever seen them, almost like she could tell what Zaynab was thinking, "that you didn't speak Gezirriya."

"I don't. Not really. I took lessons for years, but all that stuck was hello, goodbye, about half the colors, and all the curse words that my brother taught me to annoy my tutors."

Aqisa sat up, still pinning Zaynab to the ground. " _Ali_?" she said. "Ali taught you to curse?"

Zaynab snorted, and tried to get her elbows under her. In the process, she let go of her training dagger, and Aqisa clucked, leaned across her to get it and closed Zaynab's fingers around it again. Zaynab willed herself not to blush. "Muntadhir taught me how to curse. Not always intentionally."

"The Emir?"

"He's full of surprises." Zaynab mentally apologized to Muntadhir, who'd tried to introduce nobles to the court who were more fitting matches for her than elderly djinn hundreds of miles away. Handsome, unmarried men under the age of fifty, who might have been pleasing to look at, but Zaynab always thought it was like drinking watered wine. What she'd felt with Aqisa pressed against her, chest heaving, eyes wide with wonder and surprise, went a long way to explaining why. "Also, his circle is full of poets who spend half their time stumbling down drunk, and half their time wretchedly hungover, and they're either in debt or in trouble with their mistresses or both, so he picks up phrases like--" And she reeled off something that she only understood a tenth of at best, but it had something to do with camels' teats.

Aqisa's laugh sounded like it had been punched out of her. "I'll have to remember that," she said. "Lubayd will appreciate it."

Zaynab hadn't been learning to use weapons for very long, but she was quite sure that in that moment she could have killed Lubayd easily. "That's nothing. You should hear--"

"Later," said Aqisa. "We are here to train, not to swap swears."

Zaynab tightened her grip on the khanjar, and privately thought on a certain curse that had something to do with the desert, and fire honey, and ants.

-

The fact that Aqisa was sharing that smile and that laughter with Lubayd might have made Zaynab jealous, but it didn't make her stop. Whatever Aqisa might have said about being there for Zaynab's martial instruction, she didn't object too much to Zaynab's occasional "fuck" and "shit" and "damn this pimp of a moon and its whorish tides." She would blink, or breathe in very quickly, or she would laugh. Zaynab liked all of these reactions, perhaps a little too much. She did her best to concentrate on learning and not getting rolled to the ground or pinned to the wall by Aqisa, but a djinn did have needs.

Zaynab might, she thought, as Aqisa slid a thigh between hers and knocked the practice sword from her hands, need some expert advice. Definitely, she decided, as Aqisa molded her fingers around a flat bow. The only problem was that the person Zaynab would have gone for for advice in matters of the heart--or of certain lower regions--was Muntadhir, and she knew he wouldn't look too kindly on her spending so much time with one of Ali's friends. She might have asked her mother, if Hatset hadn't been sent away. And her father--her father was absolutely out of the question. For a second, Zaynab thought about asking Ali, and then she laughed so hard she had to wipe tears from her eyes. 

Anyone in the harem would use the questions as fodder for gossip. Zaynab considered, very briefly, asking Aqisa herself if she had any advice, but decided against it: she didn't want to hear about it if Aqisa was Lubayd's companion in more than one sense, or if there was a dusky-eyed desert beauty in Bir Nabat who laid claim to her heart. At one point she even considered asking Nahri, but she even though she'd trust Nahri more with her secrets than her jewelry, Nahri was easily as busy as either of Zaynab's brothers, and less likely to pardon the distraction. 

So Zaynab fought, and she swore, and she took what little of Aqisa's heat that she could have. She remembered what Muntadhir had said once about romantic entanglements: as long as it didn't disrupt any potential diplomatic match, their father wouldn't mind. He'd been drunk at the time, but she supposed he knew what he was talking about, and that if her father did find out--if there ever was anything to find out about--he'd mostly be disappointed that Aqisa wasn't a noblewoman or a wealthy merchant who could help the crown. Perhaps he'd make an effort to find her a husband with a good-looking, sharp-spirited first wife who preferred the company of her own sex. She was more worried that her father would learn she'd been fighting. After all, she could get--

"Son of an incontinent donkey!" she snapped, as Aqisa slipped the tip of a khanjar through her training jacket and against her collarbone. 

The blade poked hard enough to draw blood, and then Aqisa yanked it out. She looked angry. "You're half a foot taller than me. Use your reach."

"You've been fighting with these weapons since before I was born," Zaynab shot back, opening the top of her jacket and touching a finger to the wound. She hissed. It wasn't deep, but it hurt, and it was bleeding. 

Aqisa was staring, wide-eyed, like she'd just remembered that Zaynab was a princess, and that Zaynab's father was notoriously vicious. "Don't worry," said Zaynab. She kept a small crate of supplies in their training room, having listened to more of Nahri's rants about how her work would be so much easier if the djinn had knowledge of basic wound care and a modicum of common sense, than she'd realized, and she went to it now. "It's just a scratch. And if even if it weren't, I know all the best times to go to the infirmary when my sister-in-law will be too distracted to ask questions." Zaynab unscrewed a tin of ointment and smoothed a line of it over the cut. It stung, and she let out a, "Fuck the moon!" without thinking.

"Why do so many of your curses involve the moon?" asked Aqisa. She was suddenly there, peering first at Zaynab's wound and then the medicine crate. "They're not traditional Gezirriya phrases."

Zaynab realized suddenly that in the deserts of Am Gezira, of course no one would curse the moon; they'd save all their rancor for the sun. She'd never really thought about it before, not even with Ali living there. She'd imagined Ali, and therefore his friends and his village, as one of those charming towns not far outside a trading port, the sort of places where her cousins went on picnics and raced falcons and danced with each other. "Well," she said, "there's a well-known Divasti poet who's written an entire cycle about his true love being turned into the moon."

"Sounds rough," said Aqisa, doubling a cloth over Zaynab's wound, and starting to unroll a long strip of linen to tie it in place. 

"So," said Zaynab, knowing she was babbling and that she couldn't stop herself, "it's a popular subject for parodies. There's one in which the poet's lover left him for the moon, to get as far away from him as she possibly could because he's such a bad lover he doesn't even know it. There's another where the poet is clearly talking about his paramour's monthlies. And then there's another one where the poet wants to, you know. Fuck the moon."

Aqisa finished tying the bandage around Zaynab's collarbone. "How reassuring that you Daevabadis are addressing the great philosophical questions of our time."

"You asked."

Aqisa snorted. "That I did, but I'm not entirely sure how one would fuck the moon."

Zaynab shrugged. "There's over a hundred verses. I assume he found a way in at least one of them."

"In Am Gezira," said Aqisa, "the moon is cherished, because it isn't the sun. If we had time for poetry, it would be: fuck the sun."

Daevabad was almost constantly surrounded in fog, so the sun in its occasional appearances always struck Zaynab as glorious, dazzling as it peered out from the mist and then burned it off. As it rose yellow and set, orange and pink and purple, on the lake. "Yes?"

"Yes. You've never been in the desert. Spend a day there in high summer, outside an oasis.... By noon, you're parched, if not before. And the more time you're out there, the worse it feels. You feel like you'll go mad from it. You feel like you'll to catch fire and burn down to a husk from the heat, and the thirst--"

Zaynab swallowed. She might never have spent a day in the desert, but she was becoming quite familiar with the sensation. Her hand went to where Aqisa's rested on her collarbone. "How evocative. Perhaps you should write the fuck the sun cycle yourself."

For a moment Aqisa stared at her, as if to catch Zaynab out in--what, Zaynab did not know herself. She half-believed that if Aqisa did choose to take on the sun, it was not a battle that she would lose easily. 

"I suppose that's enough weapons practice today," said Aqisa, and slid her hand off Zaynab's shoulder. "Let's review cleaning and storage."

-

Cleaning and storage were the worst. Zaynab had enough self-possession to never complain about it, to never say that such things were what servants were for. In the deserts of Am Gezira, there weren't any servants; in Bir Nabat, Ali must have maintained his own weapons. 

But in Bir Nabat, Zaynab was sure, it wasn't like Ali had had anything more exciting to do. Not that the harem was much more exciting, but Zaynab had obligations: teas to attend, gossip to gather, reputations to ruin. Still, Zaynab didn't mind sharpening knives and oiling sheaths with Aqisa's hands guiding hers. 

She also suspected that Aqisa was angry at herself for drawing blood. Which was ridiculous because Zaynab didn't mind. At first Zaynab thought Aqisa was upset because she'd thought opening a wound, however small, on his daughter bring Ghassan's wrath down upon her, and then she remembered that Aqisa had sheltered Ali when there'd been a price upon his head, and that Aqisa was not at all scared of her king. No, she was upset because she expected better self-control of herself, expected to be able to pull her blade, especially in training with a novice like Zaynab. 

And even though Zaynab was the one who'd gotten a (very small, basically a sliver) scar from it, she was more determined than ever to shake Aqisa's self-control during training. She liked the way Aqisa looked when she moved a little too wildly. She liked the flush on her face, the slight widening of her eyes. She wanted to be the one shaking Aqisa's self-control. She wanted to see if she could make Aqisa fumble with lust. 

It wasn't fair to Aqisa, but then again, Zaynab didn't _want_ to be fair. Sometimes every lesson felt like an impossible fight against a merciless opponent, and Zaynab's mouth was the only weapon that could score a hit. And in everything else, it seemed like Zaynab could do nothing: her mother had been sent away, her younger brother exiled to working on the hospital, her older brother sunk deep in political machinations and a fractious marriage, and her father--her father the source of so much unhappiness Zaynab did not dare to confront it directly. So she took her lessons with Aqisa, and her pleasures and small displays of power where she could. 

It didn't last as long as she'd hoped. The week before Navasatem began, she let loose a complicated phrase about a rukh in a palm tree that she barely understood, and Aqisa's eyes went wide, and she snorted out a laugh, and then she grabbed Zaynab's wrist, her hand like a vise. 

"Princess," she said, and Zaynab hated it when she called her that, and she was fairly sure Aqisa knew it, which must have been why she was doing it now, to get Zaynab's attention, "you've got guts, I'll grant you that, but it's still a good idea to learn how to fight before you start cheating."

Zaynab blinked at her, because Aqisa thought she had guts, and-- "I'm not cheating," she said. "How am I cheating?"

"Well, for one thing, you keep swearing when I'm about to beat you in a match--"

"You're _always_ about to beat me in a match," said Zaynab, "and I don't do it to cheat!" Not that Zaynab was so averse to cheating that she'd normally be outraged by the accusation. She cheated at cards and other games all the time, but she took her lessons with Aqisa seriously. She knew that knowing how to fight was--theoretically, anyway--a matter of life and death. Besides, she wanted to impress Aqisa, and cheating was not impressive. "I curse even when we're not training."

A crease appeared between Aqisa's eyebrows. "That's true," she said, finally, "and half the time you're not even losing that badly when you do curse, but why else would you--"

Losing that badly? Zaynab had nearly won twice in the last month, and she hadn't even sworn during those bouts. (She thought. It was hard to keep track of everything, what with the burn of her muscles, and Aqisa rolling her across the training floor, and the smell of her braids--) "Because I like the way you look when I swear," snapped Zaynab, "and I like to imagine what else I could do to make you look like that, and, if anything, I'm far more distracted by it than you claim to be--"

Aqisa kissed her. 

Zaynab's spine must have melted, because somehow she found herself on the floor, and Aqisa was making herself extremely familiar with Zaynab's lips and tongue and, god, throat, and Zaynab did not mind, she did not mind at all. She only minded when Aqisa stopped kissing her, but even then she liked looking at her flushed face, her bright gray eyes above hers, sparkling as she smiled. Aqisa really, thought Zaynab somewhat stupidly, ought to smile more often. Zaynab really ought to give Aqisa cause to smile more often. 

Aqisa ran her fingers around the outside of Zaynab's ear, down her neck, across her shoulder. They trailed along Zaynab's arm. Aqisa smiled again, and Zaynab couldn't take it, she couldn't--

Aqisa gently unwrapped her fingers from the practice sword and sent it clattering across the room. "You should never admit a weakness in a duel," she said, still smiling, and got to her feet. 

Zaynab lay on the ground, stunned and outraged and absurdly, wholeheartedly, in love.


End file.
